Category: Poem

(Through the 2021 Texas Ice Storm I was in an Intro to Geology and College Algebra class and emotionally troubled by the goings on of the disaster, so this poem was an overflow of what I was feeling along with some key word terms I was learning in my classes at the time. Enjoy!)

My hands, my hands they touched a fire.
It was a heart full of pain and empty desire.
A cranberry red seat of emotion that bled out by the pyre.
Like a pyroclastic flow, they flowed.
Where they could go out to, they go’d.
But only walls built by its range became its domain.
Without a place to move.
Trapped and sufferin’.
The Earth cracks open.
And back into the depths we go again.

With a Hipbone swept for Mars and a breath for Venus,
a busted lip wailing
under the stretch of laughter, those two, we are
pairs up for interpretation, tarot card-boys
wearing drugstore deodorant & green earlobes,
ring fingers
dealing each other in to our games
with oven-roasted glee, olive oil hearts

put your face close to mine for pink in shades fit for paint samples,
we say it in the car, in the trunk, with your fold-up chairs
kissing like everything is a playground,
the moon, fat
sliding down plastic-metal-plastic
goes down
real smooth, you say, I remember
how my name sounded in the mirror.
it bounced off the glass,
put its tongue on my neck
you know, you say, and I do,
I used to hear lover and I’d turn
over in my bed, or red, or my stomach or something,
but now?
oh, now, I’d drink the whole ocean
I’m so dried up without.
my skin’s so fickle, you know
and I do

My body freezes
Turning my pencil griped fingertips
To blocks of ice as I come across
The boxes
I wish I had brought a lighter with me
I wish I had burned that paper
I wish I had watched the white page
Turn Black from the fire
Watching the Black ash fall to the
White
Tile floor

My eyes ride the letters
“Check 1 box”

It pains me to think but I am not one box
No matter the pride sewn into me
No matter my crown jeweled with pain
“Just be yourself” shines in a beautiful purple jewel
“Be true to who you are” glows in a stunning red jewel
But myself is non-existent
Myself the Loch ness monster
Myself Bigfoot
Myself a baby pigeon

I am not self
I am selves

My selves protons and electrons
My selves blue and red
My selves the war
My self hates myself

How can I be whole?
When my selves
Are halves of
Two different puzzles

Questions arise in me like vomit
Acid burning my throat
Decaying my teeth

Rising like molten lava
It overflows
Who am I?
Which box do I check?
Which am I related to?
The slave?
Or
The master?

My back burns with lashes
But I find myself
holding the whip
My fingers ache from
picking the cotton
From the hate
The bloodlust
Of my master
From the fear
Of me

The hot comb
Grazes, my head
Burning down my heritage
For the pleasure
Of the descendants of master
I burn for the pleasure of
Me

Two boxes
Two people
Two identities
Two selves
Only allowed to check one
The slave
To the master